Mental Health Awareness Month 2014

I have never observed this before, but apparently May has been Mental Health Awareness month since 1949.

I saw something about it last month, and it was really very similar to the first Black History month I observed. Someone mentioned it, I remembered things I wanted to read that were pertinent, and decided to put it together.

One book was The Day the Voices Stopped by Ken Steele. It was in the big reading list. It has been a fairly recent addition, but once I found out about it, I needed to read it. Knowing people who have voices, it was exciting to know that they could stop.

I had also been seeing a lot of buzz lately about the film Home:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2393825/combined

Finally, ages ago I had read an interview with Linda Carroll about her book Her Mother's Daughter: A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love. The interview was in Psychology Today, probably from when the book came out in 2006.

They were good choices. Yes, not only was there hope in The Day the Voices Stopped, but there was also so much more understanding of what it was like, and therefore so much that resonated in what other people say about their own experiences. This is what she meant!

It was frustrating to see how bad some of Steele's experiences were, when some of them could have been made better so easily. Often it was just a matter of what hospital he ended up at.

One thing that held him back was his family's refusal to seek treatment because of the stigma on mental health, and knowing that everything would be blamed on the parents. That also ended up being a factor in Carroll's book, with the added complication of adoption with its own stigma.

I do think there are a lot of things that we do better today, but Home was completely modern and while it again had a lot of hope, there were still things that were heartbreaking. As one member in group therapy describes a date, and the joke that cut him to the core but he had to pretend it didn't, it really hurt. At the same time, horrible treatment on a group outing is painful, but turns into a scene of mutual support and cake.

It has also led to more reading, because Carroll references the Summer Hill school, and now I need to know what that is all about. However, I have also been able to tell someone who wants to be a counselor but struggles in school that it is possible, because Carroll's experience bears that out.

I am able to better understand what some people say about their voices, and know that there is a possibility of those voices leaving some day. I have seen some examples of effective organizing, with Steele's work. I have learned about some experiences outside of my own.

And there's a lot more to know, so I could be back here next year, and I might end up not getting it done in May, but it was valuable. I'm glad I did it.